Murder, medicine and the first blood transfusions

Early attempts at transfusion were crude, to say the least (Image: Bettman/Corbis)

In Blood Work, Holly Tucker tells a tale of fierce rivalry, bizarre experimentation and an uneasy sense of transgression

Perhaps you remember the moment in 2006 when President George W. Bush warned of a terrifying human-sheep hybrid: "He had wool growing on him in great quantities, and Northampton's sheep tail did soon arise from his anus, or human fundament."

No? Fair enough. The quote is from Thomas Shadwell's 1676 play The Virtuoso, a comedy in which a daffy man of science, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, envisions creating "a flock" of human sheep. ("I'll make all my clothes from 'em," he declares. " 'Tis finer than a beaver.") As Holly Tucker's fascinating new account Blood Work shows, the fears underlying Bush's actual statement in his State of the Union address in support of a ban on "abuses of medical research... [including] human-animal hybrids" were far from new ones.

In the 1660s, with the advent of experiments involving blood transfusions between animals and humans, the fears of president and playwright alike took on a startling urgency. "In early European minds, the potential for species transmutation via transfusion was real and terrifying," notes Tucker, a medical historian at Vanderbilt University's Center for Medicine, Health & Society in Nashville, Tennessee.

Its beginnings were auspicious: in the aftermath of William Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood, surgeons in London and Paris began experimenting with the transfusion of blood from calves and sheep to dogs, from dogs to cows, from goats to horses, and inevitably from a sheep to a human. Britain's first recipient was Arthur Coga, a Cambridge-educated eccentric who was "cracked a little in his head", as diarist Samuel Pepys put it. His blood, by the logic of the time, needed cooling.

The experiment was a success, at least in that Coga emerged refreshed rather than deceased. (He might have been saved by the ineffectiveness of the era's transfusion gear, a makeshift delight of hollow goose quills and silver tubing.)

But by 1667, London surgeons were already being outdone by one of their French counterparts, Jean-Baptiste Denis. After daring open-air demonstrations along the Seine, Denis transfused blood from a lamb to a sickly 16-year-old-boy, and then from a calf to Antoine Mauroy, who was now insane but had previously been the irreproachable valet of the Marquise de Sevigne. Denis's dizzying rise and fall - one streaked with professional jealousy and murder - forms the heart of Tucker's tale.

Blood Work has a large and memorable cast. One striking portrait is of Richard Lower, a London surgeon of steely nerve who named his dog Spleen - because, a contemporary dryly noted, the mutt's "spleen was taken out". Those with less sang-froid than Lower wondered whether transfusions might lead to humans acquiring a donor's traits. Robert Boyle, for one, voiced the question of "Whether the colour of the hair or feathers of the recipient animal... will be changed into that of the emittent?"

The story of transfusions is a deeply human one, and not just because of who was receiving all that blood. Blood types wouldn't be identified until 1901, and Tucker posits that it was the scientific establishment itself that stalled the development of transfusion for two centuries.

The fact that many patients rejected their new blood wasn't the problem, since other equally risky procedures were carried out throughout this period. What halted progress was a potent combination of institutional rivalries, nationalism and an uneasy sense of transgression.

Though it can wander at times into the rivalries of the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, Blood Work is an evocative recreation of medicine's false spring of transfusion research during an extraordinary period in the early Enlightenment when, for a brief time, it seemed that science was gambolling about like Sir Nicholas's hybrid sheep.